#eloquent ruby

I started reading Eloquent Ruby in preparation for Dev Bootcamp. 

Some things I heard my husband say but hadn't actually read them anywhere. Some things I just thought about but now I've seen them written. 

Go easy on the comments. I thought about this before because the important ones would be buried in with all the unnecessary ones.

In Ruby you can use parenthesis or not but programmers favor parenthesis.  But sometimes they are forbidden. Don't use them with puts or if you are defining or calling a method with no parameters, leave the parenthesis off. 

Use 2 spaces to indent. Don't use tab. Tabbing can be inconsistent.

Name variables with lowercase_words_separated_by_underscores. I knew this but learned this is called "snake case."

Another gSchool week down and we have finished up reading Eloquent Ruby part III. The third section is all about metaprogramming: what it is and how to use it. So far metaprogramming looks interesting but not very useful to me currently. It looks like the kind of code that will cause lots of unexpected errors if I use it wrong and doesn't do much to make the code work when and where I want it to. It seems like it will be exceedingly useful once I get the hang of it but that for right now fooling around with it to much will just mean that things constantly break. However that just seems to be the price of learning how to use it.

As for the book, it has taught me a good bit about Ruby that I didn't know before reading it and I would recommend it to anyone trying to learn Ruby. However, I would tell them that they are unlikely to get everything in it the first or second time through the book. Several of the chapters need to be read and practiced before the lessons will really sink in.

This week at gSchool we started reading Eloquent Ruby; a book which attempts to school the new ruby programmer in the correct way to write Ruby. The author goes through the correct way to implement several Ruby features as well as going over the way that most of the community uses Ruby and structures their programs to keep them clean and clear.

The thing that really helped me out the most were the staying out of trouble sections. I felt that these areas were helping keep the reader away from areas where they could cause themselves trouble if they don't know what they are doing. A thing that I found in the staying out of trouble section that I think might be affecting the program that I am working on now (SalesEngine) was that ruby objects are mutable and I need to make sure that I don't create dependencies where they shouldn't be in the code.

Eloquent Ruby also talks about regular expressions and how they work. For the uninitiated regular expressions are a bunch of of letters, number and symbols that are used to find a certain pattern inside of strings and extract them. They are a powerful tool if you can use them but until now I had been leaving them alone in favor of other techniques but there are some things that they can be very useful for if you know how to work them. After reading through Eloquent Ruby they are more approachable and that I understand them at least a little now.